Understanding Retail’s Volatile Moment

When you do your holiday shopping this year, keep this in mind: the cashier ringing up your purchase likely worked part time at some point in their career. There’s a chance they’re borrowing money or using credit cards to pay their bills. Their income and schedules can be volatile. And it’s incredibly difficult for them to move up the career chain.

Thanks to the Fair Workweek Initiative, a project anchored at the Center for Popular Democracy, we now have a better picture of the lives of retail workers around the country. The group published their survey, “Job Quality and Economic Opportunity in Retail,” earlier this November.

Inequality.org spoke with Carrie Gleason, the director of the Fair Workweek Initiative, to talk more about the survey. “There’s this moment of disruption that’s happening right now in retail, and we wanted to get insights into where we are right now, and also understand how people are imagining the future,” Gleason told Inequality.org.

Gleason’s been organizing retail workers since 2005, and has seen a lot of trends unfold over the past decade. One of the biggest waves she noticed? The move towards a part-time workforce. “I saw this massive shift to a low road,” Gleason said. “I saw the chaos that unfolded in a lot of people’s lives who I was working very closely with.”

The survey confirmed that part-time workers are far more vulnerable to erratic incomes and hours, and see fewer opportunities for growth. But Gleason also noted that 60 percent of the full-time workers they interviewed had worked part-time jobs in the past — a statistic she found troubling.

“What we’ve seen in retail is that actually there’s a lower rung. And it starts now with a part-time job. And it’s not just, ok I’m going to work part time and work my way up to a full-time job. It’s like an obstacle course to get to a full-time job. So you have to be available all the time to really just get a few hours a week.” For workers with families, that means kids often have to adapt to…